Awake From Endless Conditioning. “Freedom From The Known,” by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Why Read It

Jiddu Krishnamurti is regarded as one of the most profound and influential spiritual teachers of the 20th century, but his path to global impact was full of ironic twists and turns. In 1909, his father was working for the Theosophical Society in Adyar, India. One day, Krishnamurti and his brother were walking the grounds and a leader of the Society saw the young boy and was struck by what he perceived as an unusual aura and spiritual potential in him. This meeting kicked off a series of events that culminated with the Society taking control of Krishnamurti’s education and grooming him to take on a messianic role as a vehicle for the ‘World Teacher’ that the Society was convinced would appear soon to usher in a worldwide spiritual awakening.

Krishnamurti fulfilled this role in the Society for 20 years. He was educated in England and traveled extensively throughout India, Europe and the United States, spreading the teachings of the Society. Due to his dynamic delivery and piercing insights, he developed a large following within the Society and around the world, but all was not well. Doubts were building within him regarding the true nature of reality. In 1925, the unexpected death of his brother sent him into existential crisis. This period was marked by intense personal inquiry and mystical experiences, and Krishnamurti emerged from this period of crisis with a renewed vision.

In 1929, Krishnamurti stood before a crowd of 3,000 people in the Netherlands and delivered his now-famous speech, Truth Is A Pathless Land, in which he publicly denounced his role as World Teacher and broke all ties with the Theosophical Society, marking a profound shift in his philosophical and spiritual journey.

Krishnamurti’s message is a simple one. There are no leaders and there are no followers. There is only you. By looking into one’s own nature, one can move into an awareness that is the fundamental substrate of reality itself. Projections dissolve, the two gives way to one, and the unending process that is life unfolds in perpetual flow. Krishnamurti spent the last 60 years of his life traveling the world and teaching, but he never claimed allegiance to any particular religion or spiritual tradition. He stood alone as a brother and sister to all.

Overview

Freedom from the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti is a seminal work in spiritual literature, offering profound insights for those on the path of spiritual enlightenment and self-realization. Krishnamurti challenges readers to question and transcend the boundaries of conventional thought, emphasizing the limitations of knowledge and the dangers of psychological conditioning. The book advocates for a radical shift in consciousness, urging individuals to liberate themselves from fear, authority, and the confines of tradition. Krishnamurti delves into the nature of the ego and its role in human conflict and suffering, illustrating how self-awareness is pivotal in understanding the true nature of the mind and reality.

Krishnamurti’s teachings focus on the significance of relationships and love, portraying them as mirrors to understand oneself and achieve a state of being that is free from jealousy, envy, and possessiveness. He emphasizes direct perception and awareness as keys to experiencing truth, steering clear of the constraints of time and the process-oriented approach to personal change. Throughout the book, Krishnamurti dismantles the structure of organized belief systems, asserting that truth is a pathless land that cannot be approached through any religion, philosophy, or guru. This work is a guide for those seeking to awaken to a deeper understanding of themselves and the world, offering a perspective that is both challenging and liberating, making it an essential read for anyone interested in the exploration of consciousness and the essence of spiritual freedom.

Key Takeaways

Self-Knowledge as the Path to Freedom: Krishnamurti emphasizes the importance of understanding oneself to achieve true freedom. This self-knowledge isn’t just intellectual but deeply experiential, akin to insights gained through psychedelic experiences, where one confronts inner truths. There is no outside authority or leader. All wisdom, knowledge, freedom is to be realized though inquiry into one’s own nature.
Conditioning and its Limitations: The book discusses how societal, cultural, and personal conditioning shapes our perception of the world. Understanding and transcending these conditions is crucial for spiritual awakening, resonating with the concept of breaking free from conventional thought patterns often experienced during psychedelic journeys.
The Illusion of the Ego: Krishnamurti argues that the ego, or self-image, is a limiting and false construct. The sense of ‘me’ is constructed through time as experience unfolds and memory builds. This ‘me’ gradually becomes the center from which one engages with all internal and external reality, and this dichotomy creates endless unnecessary conflict, pain and suffering. Awakening from ego consciousness into true awareness is the path to be trod by those moving into freedom.
Fear and Its Role in Limitation: The book delves into how fear restricts human potential and perpetuates suffering. The reader is guided to move beyond the fear of specific objects to fear itself. Ultimately, it is seen there is no separation or duality between the observer and the fear. One is fear. And in this reckoning there is an end to fear.
Freedom from Conflict: Krishnamurti discusses how internal and external conflict arises from the discrepancy between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be.’ Humans are in a constant dance of denial, seeking separation and refuge from conscious content one deems unwanted or undesirable. This process must dissolve and give way to actual seeing without judgment or condemnation. Only when one moves into such awareness that an end to conflict unfolds.

Quotes

~ “Have you ever noticed that when you are in a state of complete attention the observer, the thinker, the centre, the ‘me,’ comes to an end? In that state of attention thought begins to wither away. If one wants to see a thing very clearly, one’s mind must be very quiet, without all the prejudices, the chattering, the dialogue, the images, the pictures — all that must be put aside to look. And it is only in silence that you can observe the beginning of thought — not when you are searching, asking questions, waiting for a reply. So it is only when you are completely quiet, right through your being, having put that question, ‘What is the beginning of thought?’ that you begin to see, out of that silence, how thought takes shape. If there is an awareness of how thought begins then there is no need to control thought. We spend a great deal of time and waste a great deal of energy all through our lives, not only at school, trying to control our thoughts — ‘This is a good thought, I must think about it a lot. This is an ugly thought, I must suppress it.’ There is a battle going on all the time between one thought and another, one desire and another, one pleasure dominating all other pleasures. But if there is an awareness of the beginning of thought, then there is no contradiction in thought.”

~ “Man throughout the world is caught up in the same daily problems as ourselves, so in enquiring into ourselves we are not being in the least neurotic because there is no difference between the individual and the collective. That is an actual fact. I have created the world as I am. So don’t let us get lost in this battle between the part and the whole. I must become aware of the total field of my own self, which is the consciousness of the individual and of society. It is only then, when the mind goes beyond this individual and social consciousness, that I can become a light to myself that never goes out. Now where do we begin to understand ourselves? Here am I, and how am I to study myself, observe myself, see what is actually taking place inside myself? I can observe myself only in relationship because all life is relationship. It is no use sitting in a corner meditating about myself. I cannot exist by myself. I exist only in relationship to people, things and ideas, and in studying my relationship to outward things and people, as well as to inward things, I begin to understand myself. Every other form of understanding is merely an abstraction and I cannot study myself in abstraction; I am not an abstract entity; there I have to study myself in actuality — as I am, not as I wish to be.”

~ “To live with something like jealousy, envy or anxiety you must never get used to it, never accept it. You must care for it as you would care for a newly planted tree, protect it against the sun, against the storm. You must care for it, not condemn it or justify it. Therefore you begin to love it. When you care for it, you are beginning to love it. It is not that you love being envious or anxious, as so many people do, but rather that you care for watching. So can you — can you and I — live with what we actually are, knowing ourselves to be dull, envious, fearful, believing we have tremendous affection when we have not, getting easily hurt, easily flattered and bored — can we live with all that, neither accepting it nor denying it, but just observing it without becoming morbid, depressed or elated?”

~ “Can you watch fear without any conclusion, without any interference of the knowledge you have accumulated about it? If you cannot, then what you are watching is the past, not fear; if you can, then you are watching fear for the first time without the interference of the past. You can watch only when the mind is very quiet, just as you can listen to what someone is saying only when your mind is not chattering with itself, carrying on a dialogue with itself about its own problems and anxieties. Can you in the same way look at your fear without trying to resolve it, without bringing in its opposite, courage — actually look at it and not try to escape from it? When you say, ‘I must control it, I must get rid of it, I must understand it,’ you are trying to escape from it. To live with a living thing such as fear requires a mind and heart that are extraordinarily subtle, that have no conclusion and can therefore follow every movement of fear. Then if you observe and live with it — and this doesn’t take a whole day, it can take a minute or a second to know the whole nature of fear — if you live with it so completely you inevitably ask, ‘Who is the entity who is living with fear? Who is it who is observing fear, watching all the movements of the various forms of fear as well as being aware of the central fact of fear?’ The observer is the censor who does not want fear; the observer is the totality of all his experiences about fear. So the observer is separate from that thing he calls fear; there is space between them; he is forever trying to overcome it or escape from it and hence this constant battle between himself and fear — this battle which is such a waste of energy. As you watch, you learn that the observer is merely a bundle of ideas and memories without any validity or substance, but that fear is an actuality and that you are trying to understand a fact with an abstraction which, of course, you cannot do. But, in fact, is the observer who says, ‘I am afraid,’ any different from the thing observed which is fear? The observer is fear and when that is realized there is no longer any dissipation of energy in the effort to get rid of fear, and the time-space interval between the observer and the observed disappears. When you see that you are a part of fear, not separate from it — that you are fear — then you cannot do anything about it; then fear comes totally to an end.”

~ “As long as there is a time interval between the observer and the observed it creates friction and therefore there is a waste of energy. That energy is gathered to its highest point when the observer is the observed, in which there is no time interval at all. Then there will be energy without motive and it will find its own channel of action because then the ‘I’ does not exist. We need a tremendous amount of energy to understand the confusion in which we live, and the feeling, ‘I must understand,’ brings about the vitality to find out. But finding out, searching, implies time, and, as we have seen, gradually to uncondition the mind is not the way. Time is not the way. Whether we are old or young it is now that the whole process of life can be brought into a different dimension. Seeking the opposite of what we are is not the way either, nor is the artificial discipline imposed by a system, a teacher, a philosopher or priest — all that is so very childish. When we realize this, we ask ourselves is it possible to break through this heavy conditioning of centuries immediately and not enter into another conditioning — to be free, so that the mind can be altogether new, sensitive, alive, aware, intense, capable? That is our problem. There is no other problem because when the mind is made new it can tackle any problem. That is the only question we have to ask ourselves.”